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Guide

How to Hire a Personal Assistant

Organized people are easy to find. This is about the hard part: hiring someone you can hand your calendar, inbox, and often your money to, and how to screen a flood of near-identical applicants to find them.

By Umair Ali · ·

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Most candidates who apply to be your personal assistant can manage a diary, book travel, and keep correspondence tidy. Competence at the tasks is the common part, quick to confirm, and it will not be what decides your hire.

What decides it is trust. The role puts a near-stranger inside your schedule, your correspondence, your spending, and a clear view into your private life. The CV you decide with tells you almost nothing about the one thing that matters most: whether this person's judgment is safe when you are not watching.

This guide is for hiring a personal assistant you employ yourself, full-time or part-time, in person or remote. If you would rather pay an agency to place one, that is a different route, and I cover the trade-off below.

First, get honest about what you need

Work out what you are really buying before you write a word of the job post. Two questions settle most of it.

The first: executor or manager. An executor does the tasks you hand over. Books the flight, sends the email, files the expense. A manager owns the result. They notice the trip needs booking, pick the flight, and tell you it is handled. Those are two different people at two different prices. Hiring one when you needed the other is the most common way a PA hire goes wrong. If you want someone who thinks ahead and clears things off your plate before you ask, you are paying for judgment, and judgment is dearer and harder to spot. If you just want reliable hands for clear instructions, say so, and save the money.

The second: shape. How many hours, which hours, in person or remote, and how much of the work is personal rather than office. A part-time remote assistant doing admin is a different hire from a full-time in-person one who runs your home and your diary. Write your real answer down. It changes who you look for.

There is a harder question sitting under both, and it is worth a minute. A personal assistant cannot fix a boss who will not let go. If the real problem is that you will not delegate, will not share access, will not trust anyone with the details, no hire solves it. You pay a salary and stay exactly as busy. I cannot give you a clean way to know in advance whether that is you. But if you have churned through assistants before, or you already half-suspect you are the bottleneck, deal with it before you post the role.

I have watched this happen up close. A friend hired a good assistant and, months on, was working just as much as before, because he could not hand anything over. The assistant was fine. He was the problem. I knew the shape of it because I had the same thing in me, a quiet belief that if I did a job myself it stood a better chance of being right, so I kept it all. No hire was ever going to fix that. I had to start letting go, one task at a time, and the work got better only once I did.

Hire yourself, or pay an agency

There is a real fork here, and since the search results for this are full of agencies, it helps to be clear about the trade.

An agency sources and vets candidates, often checks references and trust, and hands you a small set to interview. It is fast. For household or executive roles it can be genuinely good at the trust part. You pay for that, usually a placement fee that runs into real money, sometimes a slice of the salary. You also get less choice and less say in how it runs.

Doing it yourself costs less and gives you full control. It also drops the whole screening load on you. For a first PA on a budget, that is usually the right call, as long as you have some way to handle the volume. Volume is the part that breaks people, and it is what the rest of this guide is about. One exception. If the role carries unusual trust, access to large sums, to a private home, to children, an agency's vetting can be worth the fee by itself. Match the route to the risk.

Write the role around your bottleneck

The standard PA job description is a task list plus a row of tidy adjectives. Organized, proactive, detail-oriented, strong communicator. Every applicant claims all four, so the list filters no one.

Build the post around your real bottleneck instead. What is eating your week that this person will take off you? Something like: you will own my calendar and inbox, so I stop losing hours to scheduling and never miss a client reply. That tells a real candidate what the job is, and lets them judge whether it suits them. Name the two or three things that truly matter. Mark the rest as nice to have, and be honest about which is which.

One warning for this role. Go easy on listing "proactive" as a requirement. It is the most claimed and least proven quality in any PA application. Everyone writes it. Nobody can be screened for it by being asked "are you proactive?" You test it later, with scenarios. Putting the word in the advert does nothing.

The screening problem nobody warns you about

Here is what happens when you post a PA role. You get flooded. Assistant openings pull some of the biggest applicant piles of any job, because the skills are common and applying is easy. A hundred applicants is normal. Several hundred happens.

On paper they all look the same. The same neat CV, the same adjectives, the same tools, and plenty of claims nobody has ever checked. The thing that separates a great assistant from an average one is judgment, and judgment does not show up in a document everyone has learned to write the same way. So the usual shortcuts, keyword-matching the CV or picking the best-written ones, just sort for who writes a good CV. You end up interviewing the best writers. That was never the job.

What to test in the interview

Skills you can mostly take at face value, or check in a minute. Spend the interview on the two things that decide a PA hire and stay hidden on a CV: judgment and discretion. Both show up best in real situations, not in "tell me about your strengths."

Give them the messy problems this job really contains, and listen to how they reason:

  • I ask you to book me on a flight, but the only sensible option lands on my daughter's birthday, which you know about from my calendar. What do you do?
  • Two people each tell you their thing is my top priority today, and they contradict each other. How do you handle it?
  • You spot a mistake you have made that I have not noticed yet. Walk me through what you do.
  • A colleague copies you on something clearly confidential by mistake. What happens next?
  • A week in, you think I am doing something inefficiently. Do you say anything, and if so, how and when?

There are no clean right answers, and that is the point. Listen for how they weigh competing demands, when they escalate and when they decide alone, how they treat information that is not theirs, and whether they can push back on you in a way that helps. Someone who only says what they think you want to hear is showing you how they will behave when it counts.

Ask about failure straight out. What is a mistake you made in a past assistant job, and what did you do about it? Someone who cannot name one has either never held the responsibility or is managing you in the room. You do not want to be managed by your assistant in an interview.

References are not optional for this role

For most jobs, reference checks are a box people tick in a hurry. For a personal assistant, they are the best signal you will get. The person who can tell you whether someone handles access and judgment well is the last boss who trusted them with both.

Call former employers yourself, and ask about the things an interview cannot prove. Did they keep sensitive things to themselves? Did they see what needed doing before being told? Is there anything you would not have handed them? Would you hire them again? Often the pause before the answer says more than the words. A shiny CV next to vague or reluctant references is a warning. Believe the references.

The paid trial, honestly

The best predictor of whether a PA will work out is watching them do the work for a short spell. The agencies that live in this space lean on trial-to-hire for that exact reason. If you can set one up, a few paid days or one small real project teaches you more than any interview.

It is not always possible, and I will not pretend otherwise. Someone leaving another job often cannot trial for you, and some of the work is too sensitive to hand a stranger on day one. So treat it as situational. Where you can run one, pay properly, keep it real rather than a set exercise, and watch the things you care about: how they follow through, how they use judgment, and how it feels to work next to them.

The part you cannot do alone

Everything above assumes you already have a short list of trustworthy-looking people worth interviewing and reference-checking. Getting from a flood of near-identical applicants down to that short list is the part that beats most people hiring on their own.

That is where BestHire helps. It is worth being exact about what it does and what it leaves to you. You post the role and get one link that gathers every applicant in one place. It sorts them on what they have done, not on keyword matches, so a strong assistant who wrote about their experience in plain words does not get dropped for it. Then it interviews every applicant who fits, not a handful you guessed at, and each interview is built from that person's own CV. It presses on the specific claims they made, the "managed a C-suite calendar" and "handled all the travel and expenses" lines that everyone writes and almost nobody gets questioned on. It reads only what the person says, never their face, voice, or accent. Then it ranks them by whose claims held up, and gives you a short list with the proof attached: the line from the CV, and the answer that backed it or broke it. It rejects nobody. Every call is yours.

Here is what it does not do, and what no honest tool would claim to. It does not judge whether someone can be trusted. That is the heart of a PA hire, and it stays with you, decided by your scenario questions, your reference calls, and a trial if you can run one. What the tool gives you is room to do that properly. Trust-vetting a hundred people is impossible. Trust-vetting the five whose claims already held up is a normal afternoon.

The short version

  • Organized people are everywhere. Trustworthy judgment you cannot see on a CV is the rare part.
  • Decide first whether you need an executor or a manager. Different hires, different prices.
  • A PA cannot fix a boss who will not delegate. Sort that out before you post.
  • Take skills at face value. Spend the interview on judgment and discretion, using real scenarios.
  • References are your strongest signal here. Call past bosses, and listen for the pause.
  • A short paid trial beats any interview, when you can run one.

This is the assistant-specific chapter of a bigger process. The full sequence, from posting the role to making the offer, is in How to Hire Your First Employee.

Frequently asked questions

Put judgment and trust first. The task skills, calendar, travel, inbox, are common and quick to confirm, so let them decide nothing on their own. Here is a filter the rest of this guide skips: favour someone who has already held a similar level of access, running a household budget, managing a busy executive's inbox, over someone stepping up several trust levels at once. The size of the jump in responsibility predicts trouble as much as the skills do.

An agency is faster and often vets for trust, but it charges a placement fee, commonly a flat sum or a share of the first-year salary, and gives you less choice. Doing it yourself costs less and hands you control, at the price of running the screening. For a first PA on a budget, do it yourself, as long as you can handle the applicant volume. If the role involves large sums, a private home, or children, the agency's vetting may earn its fee.

A candidate who cannot name a single past mistake. Interview answers that only echo what you seem to want to hear. References that go vague or hesitant when you ask specific questions about discretion. And a CV that reads as unusually polished with thin detail underneath, because for this role, presentation is the easiest thing to fake and the least useful. One of these is a reason to slow down, not a verdict on its own.

You cannot read it off a CV, and no screening tool can settle it for you. Two signals are real: how they reason through discretion scenarios, and what past bosses say when you ask directly. A short paid trial is the strongest test there is. One thing the body skips: do not hand over full access on day one. Start them narrow, widen it as they earn it, and treat discretion as something proven over weeks, not granted up front.

It varies a lot with need. Part-time roles often sit somewhere between five and twenty-five hours a week. Full-time is a standard week or more, especially for household or executive support. Decide your real hours before posting, because it changes who applies and whether part-timers or full-timers see the role as a fit.

A virtual assistant works remotely and usually handles admin, often part-time or through a service. A personal assistant, especially in person, covers a wider and more personal scope, including household and errands, and works more closely and confidentially with you. If your needs are mostly remote admin, a virtual assistant is likely enough and cheaper. If you need someone physically present, or handling personal and sensitive matters, hire a personal assistant.

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